[info] [croquet-user] Why is collaboration using Croquet better than wikis and forums?

[Eugen Leitl]

----- Forwarded message from Darius Clarke <socinian at gmail.com> -----

From: Darius Clarke <socinian at gmail.com>
Date: Thu, 13 Mar 2008 00:49:53 -0700
To: croquet-user at duke.edu, Marcus Lunzenauer <mlunzena at uni-osnabrueck.de>
Subject: Re: [croquet-user] Why is collaboration using Croquet better than wikis and forums?
Reply-To: croquet-user at duke.edu, Darius Clarke <socinian at gmail.com>

Hi Marcus,

Well, I don't have knowledge of such a paper, yet here are some of my
thoughts that might help.

The luddite answer might be that immersive 3D is not better than
vector graphics, photos, and text for most things we do today. The
usefulness depends on what the community is creating. For creating
news, journals, documentation, text, movie/TV scripts, conversation
dialogs, reasonings, encyclopedias, source code, and most other text
base community collaboration projects wikis and forums will always be
better ... and those sorts of things are what most people do today.

The population tends not to go shopping in big, collaborative groups
so online 3D shopping is not better than today's 2D shopping which is
based on text and search.

However, as today's gaming generations matures and the amount of
information and rules the world's population will be expected to
perceive, judge, understand, and operate within increases
exponentially, new means of media communication and presentation of
those concepts and the human responses to it will need to be created.
We must learn how to perceive and work within "many systems made up of
many more subsystems". This new media will need to be something
massive, like massive multi-player games (MMOG).

Future shoppers will see the products and services they are evaluating
simulated, animated, and in use in the shopper's own personalized,
tailored contexts before the purchase. It's not just seeing the
clothes fitted on your personal physique, but how it will appear on
location at the dinner party with the other guests who are
simultaneously evaluating their own clothes selection with you.

Here's an older example with which you may have had some personal
contact. When society trains airplane pilots, do they prefer to use
2D, wikis, forums, and text for the best training for flying, for
collaborating with other pilots, and for collaborating with air
traffic controllers on the ground? Or, do they use 3D simulations?
Which pilot would you feel safer with when he controls of the planes
you ride, one that was trained in wikis and forums or one trained in a
flight simulator? Why? Since we have so few crashes considering the
number of planes flying every minute of every day, the simulation
approach seems to work. The same is true with most military training.
Military training, where mistakes can be tremendously costly in a
complex, ever-changing theater of action, is not done with wikis and
forums. They learn by doing and learn from making mistakes in a safer,
simulated environment.

Due to the exponential growth of knowledge and the corresponding
required level of discernment to judge that information and because of
ever increasing time/location constraints, their tolerances, and their
interdependencies becoming more critical, most endeavors in life will
become more and more like piloting a plane or building a skyscraper
(Building Information Modeling) than pushing paperwork as was done in
the past. Old blueprints just can't change fast enough when the
decisions of thousands of people continuously keep changing the
building's design in tiny ways every minute.
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Building_Information_Modeling)

You might check out this book by Clark Aldrich
"Learning by Doing: A Comprehensive Guide to Simulations, Computer
Games, and Pedagogy in e-Learning and Other Educational Experiences"
http://www.amazon.com/Learning-Doing-Comprehensive-Simulations-Educational/dp/0787977357/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1205393002&sr=8-1

Cheers,
Darius

On Wed, Mar 12, 2008 at 9:34 AM, Marcus Lunzenauer
<mlunzena at uni-osnabrueck.de> wrote:
> I am searching for (scientific) papers dicussing benefits of
> collaboration using Croquet (or any other suiting 3D environment)
> instead of using old 2D applications like wikis or forums. Where can I
> find evidence when I say "Using a 3D environment like Croquet for
> collaboration creates additional benefits to more traditional tools
> (wikis, forums)."
>
> As of now I am thinking of citing Seymour Papert's constructionism and
> Donna Harroway's "Situated Knowledge".
>
> If anyone knows of a more to the point research paper, I would be so
> grateful! :-)
>
> Thanks a lot,
> Marcus
>

----- End forwarded message -----
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Eugen* Leitl <a href="http://leitl.org">leitl</a> http://leitl.org
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